What You Can Do in the Wake of the Venezuela TPS Ruling

By Josh Leach on May 22, 2025

A recent Supreme Court order has temporarily allowed the Trump administration to terminate the immigration status of nearly 350,000 Venezuelan refugees living in the United States. This cruel decision deals a blow to hundreds of thousands of families — and to Temporary Protected Status (TPS) holders of other nationalities — who depend on the TPS program to shield them from deportation to places where their lives would be at risk. 

Our partners at the National TPS Alliance have been fighting for nearly a decade for justice and citizenship for TPS holders. They brought the legal challenge to the TPS termination that the Supreme Court considered this week. While the Court’s order is a setback, our partners are undeterred. The National TPS Alliance will keep fighting, and our UU values of upholding human dignity call us to be in solidarity with their efforts to secure TPS holders’ rights.  

Here’s how you can help: Right now, the Senate is considering a tax and spending package that could add billions more dollars to support Trump’s detention and deportation powers. Lawmakers should deny this request for a cruel waste of taxpayer resources — particularly when hundreds of thousands of families are now at heightened risk of deportation under the Court’s ruling. Help us send this message by contacting your Congresspeople today.  

What is TPS and how did the Trump administration cancel it? 

Temporary Protected Status (TPS) provides a renewable, 18-month shield from deportation to people whose home countries are facing humanitarian crises. The government can decide—at the end of the 18-month period—to extend or cancel a given TPS designation. But they are only supposed to do so based on a good-faith assessment of whether the conditions that justified TPS have abated. 

In this case, the Trump administration followed none of those procedures. Instead of waiting for the 18-month window to expire, they moved to cancel the program immediately — something that (as the district court found in our partner’s lawsuit), has never happened before in the 35 years of the program’s existence. 

The officials responsible for this decision also have a long history of making defamatory and racist comments against Venezuelans. This suggests that their decision to cancel the status had nothing to do with conditions in Venezuela, and everything to do with unjust stereotypes — plus Trump’s overall anti-immigrant agenda. 

What does the Court’s decision mean for TPS holders? 

The Supreme Court’s brief, two-paragraph order is not a final decision on the merits. Moreover, the justices specifically left open the possibility of bringing other lawsuits, based on the loss of work authorization and other downstream consequences from the administration’s decision. The legal fight for TPS will, therefore, undoubtedly continue. 

Nevertheless, the consequences of the court’s ruling are potentially dire. If people lose their TPS status and don’t have pending cases for asylum or other forms of relief, they become vulnerable to arrest and deportation. The administration could try to remove people directly to Venezuela, where they may face persecution at the hands of the country’s authoritarian government. 

Even worse, the Trump administration has contracted with the dictator of El Salvador to confine Venezuelans in one of the worst prisons in the world. Federal courts have temporarily blocked this policy from taking effect. But the administration has repeatedly flouted and tried to circumvent these orders. Meanwhile, hundreds of innocent people, who were deported without due process under this policy, remain trapped in El Salvador’s nightmarish prison to this day. 

How should Congress respond? 

Even as potentially hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan refugees become newly vulnerable to deportation, Congress is weighing legislation that would grant billions in additional funding for Trump’s “mass deportation” agenda. Versions of the bill, which has already passed the House and is now before the Senate, would expand immigration detention and even extend the contract with El Salvador to confine Venezuelans indefinitely in the notorious CECOT prison. 

Congress should do everything it can to restrain Trump’s deportation powers, not expand them. That’s why we’re calling on Congress to vote NO on detention and removal funding in the upcoming spending bill. 

You can help us send this message: Contact your legislators through this form today. Let them know that not one more penny of our taxpayer dollars should go to arresting and confining innocent people in horrendous conditions — least of all when courts and the executive branch are placing thousands more people at risk of this fate by unjustly canceling TPS.